Seems to be a good idea for me. But I think the color of the vertizes on the rear should be lighter - not those in front. Appears more logically to me.
And if someone's integrating this into Blender: The user should decide if he/she wants it on. So I would suggest to put a switch button into the info window for example (If there is space left! . I would switch it on, because it can make messing around in the mesh more easy. But there are surely people out there who don't like that...

There's still one little issue to work out with my code. Blender doesn't sort the mesh in any particular way. If a rear edge is drawn last, it can occlude a forward edge, hiding the forward edge behind a rear one.

I need to come up with a way to zsort the mesh data before drawing it.

this is a good improvement to blender. Can you forbid the selection of rear vertices?

Oh.. there seems to be already all you need to sort in Z in blender. The HOTKEYS are CTRL+F out of edit mode, but god knows where this is in the source so you can make it automatically when entering edit mode.

Maybe it would be even better if you made the edges go from black to white, instead of black to grey, and the vertex from a very dark purple to a very light purple or maybe just make the near vertices darker and leave the far ones the way they are.

Anyway that's a feature i have always wanted to have (sometimes I select the wrong vertex thinking that the are closer that what they are). Finally, one of my dreams is fullfiled! lol

Actually, I've been considering this as well; in my days using and teaching TOPAS this was one of the features of the modeler. We called it Depth-Cue and it was a logical switch. You could either turn it on or off.

In Wire frame mode it made it easier to select faces and/or vertices by seeing their relative distances from the viewer.

An enhancement on that though might also include the ability to control the color of the wire-frame.

Cheers

rwenzlaff wrote:http://www.soylent-green.com/snapshot3.png

Note how I change the color of the edge/vert to signify depth. (Lighter edges are rear)

Using the z-order for a coloured depth cue would be a great help! (definitely greyed out when further away, not grey for closer edges)

I've used something similar in Amapi and it really helps. As long as we're at it though... rather than just fading the colours out or changing them, automatic transparency option would also come in handy for the back faces.

Options might be
s - "single colour" - as is now
m - "multiple colours" (for the colour mad!) d/g - "grey or dim the back faces" - maybe grey - 'd' might confuse with delete!
c/h - "hide or cull the back faces" - hide would be more consistent

Can't think what Key menu this would fit into, but the buttons would fit into the "Draw Type" pop-up menu (where you pick the equivalent of Ctrl-Z, shaded, etc

For a 3D app, thoughts should always consider screen drawing speed... Mainly for something like this that would require CPU processing power to sort them and then assign colors and then send the data to be drawn on screen... the drawing might be lightning fast but the processing before hand is all done on the CPU.

Any little bit that can be done to shave a millisecond or two off or to make anything faster is well worth it in 3D production.